The mysterious flame of Queen Loana

Page Tools

Ah, the mysterious titles of Umberto Eco. This one, which it
shares with a 1940s comic book about a 2000-year-old African queen,
goes to the heart of the matter. The genre Mysterious Flame
rests on, as detective fiction was to Name of the Rose, as
occult speculation was to Foucault's Pendulum, is
picture-book pulp, many pages of which illustrate the text.

The set-up - and indeed, it is contrived - is that an
antiquarian bookseller, Yambo, finds himself without any
fundamental memories (who he is, what he does), but with a largely
intact memory of his reading. References to Borges' Funes the
Memorious are duly registered. His stream of consciousness
before treatment is an allusive Joycean patter, connecting his
strange sensations to much more vividly apprehended fragments of
literary history. When told his younger, vivacious wife Paola is to
visit him, he asks what if he mistakes her for a hat - which might
seem droll if you were already in a good mood.

Once our semi-memorious hero goes home, Eco milks the first-time
experiences of the ageing savant. Making love is at least as good
as the literature on the topic. Defecating outside is good too.

Yambo decides to work with the functioning aspects of his
memory, particularly his capacity for visual association, to
recover the life he has forgotten. He is especially concerned that
he doesn't know what the love he shared with his first wife was
like. Conveniently, there is a disused chapel, at the villa where
he grew up, where he had accumulated all the detritus of his
boyhood.

And so we pass through his enthusiasms, with illustrations. He
remembers what every stamp collector knows, how suggestive an
image, a sovereign's face, a colour scheme can be (here his
collection had an antipodean edge: the Territory of New Guinea, the
British Solomons, the Fiji Islands). He also did cigarette
tins.

There are the Fascist boys' own papers that manage to exploit
some of the same exoticism with their tales of brave Italians in
Abyssinia.

Where an adult can't help classifying the visual material by
origin (specifically Italian, pan-European, British or American) or
style (literary illustration, comic book), and Eco somewhat
schematically organises it, there is also something of a sense of
the way such distinctions mean less to an emerging sensibility.

Sometimes vagaries of origin are part of the story, and here
Mysterious Flame contains some interesting cultural history.
The versions of Disney comics the young Yambo collects are usually
rip-offs, "pirated", to use the contemporary, disproportionate
term.

As comics they could seem too trivial for the Fascist government
to censor: Yambo first hears of the possibility of a free press
when Mickey Mouse, Topolino as he was in the Italian, starts up his
own newspaper. But they could matter. When the US entered the war,
Italian readers uniquely watched Mickey Mouse being killed.

Yambo's tastes alter predictably with puberty, when
sophistication and sauciness go hand in hand. He begins to state as
facts elements of his life. By the end of his study of his own
archive, he speaks the language of a composite graphical novel,
while the full-page illustrations are Eco's own bright montages and
pastiche of an ahistorical hybrid style.

The narrative of Yambo's life turns out to be a whole lot more
ordinary than the tales that fascinated him, which is almost
invariably the case. He felt Fascism's pull and that of the Church,
but also was taken by rough wits of a left-wing bent. The yearnings
of a pastel-coloured romantic aren't completely disappointed in
human love. This is realistic, but what an edifice to get
there.

Mysterious Flame is intelligently framed. You could ring
the changes of any theory of memory and identity, or collecting, on
it and it would sound; it doesn't seem a compelling artefact,
however, to enhance such a theory.

Robert Calasso's translator Geoffrey Brock replaces William
Weaver, Eco's usual translator, the man who introduced the
Anglosphere to Italo Calvino besides. He seems on top of the
problems of allusion and multilingualism the text throws up and his
version is attractively light for all that. But the writing is not
the tour de force it needs to be to sustain such a schematic
structure.